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Adam Roberts is hot.

Back in high school I was a bit of a weird kid. I was an undefined artist. I wasn’t easily categorized because I never excelled at one thing. I was a photographer, an Olympics of the Mind science team member, a singer in chorus, an actor in every school show, a marching band dancer and flag spinner. I didn’t do sports. I was an average student. I liked to read but didn’t study. In the Madonna crazed 80’s I dressed like a bobby-sock girl from the 1950’s. Me and my closest friends were called “band fags.”

Once I got out of my small hometown and broadened my horizons, I began to realize that all my geeky artistic friends were some of the coolest people I knew. Unlike jocks and prom queens stuck in their glory days of senior year in high school, artists evolve and grow into their personas yet. Tilda Swinson may not have been the prettiest girl in the Oscar auditorium on Sunday night, but she certainly did exude a gloriously individual kind of beauty. Didn’t she?

So where am I going with all this? Well now that I’m an adult, I don’t have as many hang ups about being popular and what people think about me based on my looks. I am what I am and as far as I’m concerned, as writers go, I’m not that bad looking.

Which brings me now to my food blogging hero, Adam Roberts (AKA the Amateur Gourmet). Adam, most would say, is a nerd. He’s a nebbishy, fast-talking, glasses-wearing gay guy that likes to cook, sing, make musicals with eggs and writes show tunes about lasagna with his NY Broadway show loving friends. He’s got one hell of a sense of humor and he’s not that bad looking. What’s more, in the food blogging world, Adam Roberts is supremely cool. He’s so cool to food bloggers like me, that we’d call him HOT and then do a big double snap thing around our head once or twice. That’s how cool he is.

So when Adam recently became a virtual Food Network Star as the on-line host of the “FN DISH”, I rejoiced. Each week Adam interviews Food Network stars and gets the inside scoop of what happens behind the scenes– and in the kitchens of–the Food Network. The interviews are funny, pleasantly uncomfortable, and totally watch able. Finally, food blogging pioneers have not only found success in publishing (with the publishing of Julie and Julia, Chocolate and Zucchini’s book, and Orangette joining Bon Appetit) but now are joining the mucky-mucks of the television world! Hooray!

FOOD GEEKS UNITE!

On the Food Network Website, however, the tone of the comments left by FN Dish viewers is quite negative. “Where’d you get this guy?” a number of viewers asked. “The show is great,” one person wrote, “but why don’t you get someone more good looking?”

I felt like I’d been kicked in the stomach. Suddenly, I was back in high school watching one of my “band fag” friends get beat up by a thick-necked football jock. Who were these people? How could they not know how cool the Amateur Gourmet is? How could they be so cruel? So populist? Surely in the food world not everyone has to be good looking to be popular. Right?

In the name of all things right, I urge you to pay a little visit to the Food Network site and watch some of Adam’s shows and leave some positive comments about the FN Dish. Adam is a representative of food bloggers and food blogs’ power to connect to thousands of food-obsessed people through the printed word. Not the pretty face.

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Knife Skills Illustrated

Sometimes when I pick up my chef’s knife I get a sort of stage fright. Everything will be going along just fine with my dicing of an onion and then all of a sudden it happens. I try to focus on the vegetable or the fruit I need to cut, and suddenly my attempts to clear my mind of judgement fails and I have to stop. I can’t cut a thing. Even though there’s no one in my kitchen checking my knife sills, I can feel the presence of a great chef judging me.

I think it was last year when my knife skills problem started.

It all began when I saw this one episode of THE NEXT FOOD NETWORK STAR. It was the show when Iron Chef Morimoto tests the hopeful TV chefs with a quick challenge. He hands the contestants a chef’s knife and a fish and tells them to filet the thing.

It was horrifying what happened next. In this pool of talented food professionals, most of the contestants couldn’t filet the fish. One or two skilled people were able to de-bone the fish in just a few minutes, but all the other kitchen jocks just destroyed the fish. It was embarrassing. One woman did such a bad job Morimoto couldn’t even look at her.

He just stared at the messy pile of wasted fish and frowned. “Uh, basically,” he said, “you have no knife skills.”

And that, as they say, was that.

Now every time I step up to my chopping board, I hear Morimoto saying the very same thing to me.

Over and over again.

“Uh, basically, you have no knife skills.”

No matter how swift (“Uh, basically, you have no knife skills”) or how uniformed my technique (“Uh, basically, you have no knife skills”), I feel Morimoto’s critical gaze checking my work. Sometimes, even my husband says the dreaded phrase (“Uh, basically, you have no knife skills”)—just to mess with me.

But all of that is over now.

Thanks to the Cooks Library and swell guy named Peter Hertzmann and his book Knife Skills Illustrated, I’ll be slicing my onions like a master.

This book is my new bible. Whenever I’m ready to slice and dice, I pick up my Knife Skills book and get reading. The pages are full of great illustrations that make learning knife skills from a book absolutely possible.


Like this illustration, for example. Basically, I had no idea I was holding the knife wrong. According to Hertzman, if you want to have great knife skills, it’s all about the pinch grip.

I’m so down with the pinch grip.


This is not the pinch grip.


This, my friends, is me doing the pinch grip.

I have to agree with my new friend Peter, the pinch grip gives me way more control over the knife. Holding the knife like this hurts a little at first (tender hands of a novice), but very soon I’ll get a knife-skills-blister just like the pros! I’m so excited!

I’m so excited, I even took pictures of myself cutting brussels sprouts. Because I’m a big fat food blogging nerd.

I’m beside myself happy. There are just so many vegetables to be sliced. Multitudes of onions to practice on. I can’t wait to perfect the art of deboning a chicken! Just you wait Morimoto. I’ll have knife skills yet!